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Decodo VS MarkItDown

Compare Decodo VS MarkItDown and see what are their differences

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Decodo logo Decodo

Decodo is perhaps the most user-friendly way to access local data anywhere. It has global coverage with 195 locations, offers more than 55M residential proxies worldwide and a great deal of scraping solutions.

MarkItDown logo MarkItDown

The MarkItDown library is a utility tool for converting various files to Markdown (e.g., for indexing, text analysis, etc.).
  • Decodo Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-08-26

Decodo has been a promising proxy provider since its first days in 2018. They offer a wide selection of proxies (residential, shared and private datacenter proxies) and three full-stack scraping APIs with 100% success rates and a no-code scraper. It has an easy-to-use dashboard, public API, and flexible payment methods. Being awarded for its consumer-centric approach, Decodo continues to look for ways to make public data gathering as simple and accessible to everyone as possible.

The key things Decodo offers for you:

  • 55M+ high-quality residential IPs with an average speed of <0.5 sec.

  • Global coverage โ€“ target 195+ locations, including cities and 50 US states.

  • Pay As You Go option - $3.5 per 1GB.

  • 500K+ shared and dedicated datacenter IPs.

  • Unlimited connections and threads.

  • Full anonymity and security.

  • Smart Wallet for easy payment management.

  • Fantastic 24/7 support with 40s average response time.

  • User-friendly dashboard with a quick and easy proxy setup.

  • Detailed documentation and an informative blog.

  • A bunch of free tools with any plan subscription.

  • Free trial for all products..

Not present

Decodo features and specs

  • Large Proxy Pool
    Smartproxy offers a vast pool of residential and data center proxies, which expands the choice and decreases the chance of IP bans.
  • User-friendly Dashboard
    The service provides an intuitive and easy-to-use dashboard, making it simple for users to manage their proxies and monitor usage.
  • High Anonymity
    Smartproxy ensures high levels of anonymity and privacy, useful for activities requiring discreetness like web scraping.
  • Global Coverage
    With proxies available in numerous locations worldwide, users can access geographically restricted content or conduct broad market research.
  • 24/7 Customer Support
    Their customer support is available around the clock, offering reliable and prompt assistance to users via live chat and email.
  • Flexible Pricing Plans
    Smartproxy provides a range of pricing plans catering to different needs and budgets, including pay-as-you-go options.

Possible disadvantages of Decodo

  • Higher Cost for Premium Plans
    While they do offer flexible pricing, the more advanced plans can be expensive, making them less accessible for smaller businesses or individual users.
  • Usage Limitations
    There are bandwidth limitations depending on the plan you choose, which can be restrictive for tasks requiring large data transfers.
  • Shared Proxies
    Some of the proxies are shared, which can potentially slow down connection speeds or lead to IP bans if other users abuse the service.
  • No Free Trials
    Smartproxy does not offer a free trial, which could deter potential customers who are unwilling to commit without trying the service first.
  • Learning Curve for Advanced Features
    Utilizing some of the more sophisticated functionalities might require a learning curve, especially for users not familiar with proxy services.

MarkItDown features and specs

  • Open Source
    MarkItDown is open source, meaning that anyone can contribute to its development or customize it for personal use. This promotes community involvement and transparency.
  • Microsoft Backed
    As a Microsoft project, it likely benefits from the support and resources of a major tech company, potentially leading to reliable updates and maintenance.
  • Markdown Support
    The tool supports Markdown, which is widely used for formatting text in a simple and readable way, making it accessible for users familiar with this syntax.
  • Versatile Use Cases
    Suitable for various applications such as documentation, note-taking, and content creation, offering flexibility to different user needs.

Possible disadvantages of MarkItDown

  • Limited Features
    Compared to more comprehensive markdown editors, MarkItDown might lack advanced features which could limit its appeal for power users seeking extensive customization options.
  • Learning Curve
    Users not familiar with Markdown may face a learning curve to effectively use the tool, potentially hindering its adoption for those users.
  • Integration Limitations
    There might be limitations in integrating MarkItDown with other platforms or workflows, affecting users who need seamless integration with existing systems.
  • Support and Community
    Despite being Microsoft-backed, community support might be limited compared to other open-source projects with larger active communities.

Analysis of Decodo

Overall verdict

  • Smartproxy is generally well-regarded in the proxy service industry. It is recommended for those who need reliable and efficient proxy solutions with a balance of cost and performance. However, like any service, itโ€™s important for users to assess their specific needs and test the platform to ensure it meets their requirements.

Why this product is good

  • Smartproxy is considered a good proxy service provider due to its extensive network of residential IP addresses, competitive pricing, and high success rates for web scraping and bypassing geo-restrictions. The service offers user-friendly management tools and responsive customer support, making it suitable for both beginners and advanced users. Additionally, Smartproxy places a strong emphasis on security and privacy, which are crucial factors for many users.

Recommended for

  • Web scraping professionals
  • SEO specialists
  • Businesses looking to bypass geo-restrictions
  • Users concerned with online privacy and security
  • Data miners needing reliable residential proxies

Analysis of MarkItDown

Overall verdict

  • MarkItDown is a solid, lightweight open-source utility from Microsoft that reliably converts a wide range of file formats into clean Markdown, making it especially useful for LLM and RAG workflows.

Why this product is good

  • Supports many formats including PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, images, audio, HTML, and more
  • Optimized to produce Markdown output that works well with LLMs and text analysis pipelines
  • Open source and backed by Microsoft, with active development and community contributions
  • Simple Python API and CLI that integrate easily into automation and data-processing workflows
  • Lightweight and free to use, with optional plugin support for extending functionality

Recommended for

  • Developers building RAG or LLM pipelines that need clean text extraction
  • Data engineers converting diverse document formats into a unified Markdown format
  • Teams needing automated document-to-text conversion for indexing or search
  • Python developers who want a simple CLI or library for file conversion
  • Anyone preparing documents for ingestion into AI or NLP tools

Decodo videos

Residential rotating proxies. Why choose Smartproxy?

More videos:

  • Tutorial - Smartproxy review &amp; How to smartproxy
  • Review - Proxies for Scraping
  • Tutorial - How to Start Using Smartproxy
  • Review - Smartproxy Review 2023: Best Price To Value Proxies
  • Review - IPFighter| Review Smartproxy
  • Review - DECODO Review 2025 (Ex-Smartproxy) | Still the BEST Proxy?
  • Review - Decodo Review 2025 (former Smartproxy) | FULL Review of new features!

MarkItDown videos

No MarkItDown videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

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Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Decodo and MarkItDown)
Proxy
100 100%
0% 0
Documentation
0 0%
100% 100
Residential Proxies
100 100%
0% 0
Markdown Editor
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Decodo and MarkItDown

Decodo Reviews

  1. Vladyslav
    ยท Backend Developer at KittenProperties ยท
    Very good quality

    Residential proxy is quite good. High success rate with their proxies even though it is quite expensive

    ๐Ÿ Competitors: NetNut.io
    ๐Ÿ‘Ž Cons:    Expensive
  2. CPAScraping
    ยท Working at CPA Scraping ยท
    My Review of Smartproxy Service

    Smartproxy, in my experience, is a solid choice for heavy-duty web scraping tasks. Been using it for bulk data mining. Their proxy pool's massive โ€“ good for avoiding blocks and captchas. Speed's decent, uptime mostly consistent. Setup? Straightforward. But yeah, pricing's a bit on the higher side, especially for large-scale operations. Overall, Smartproxy delivers, especially for those heavy scraping needs.

    ๐Ÿ‘ Pros:    Ip diversity|Quick data access|Minimal downtime|User-friendly interface:
    ๐Ÿ‘Ž Cons:    Pricey|Some geo-restrictions.|Ometimes slow response.

Proxy Service Awards 2024
After all these years, we still canโ€™t find a provider that combines mid-market rates, premium-grade performance, and newbie-friendly user experience as well as Smartproxy. You can get proxies that work effectively as well or better than enterprise providers, without investing thousands of dollars to reach their bulk rates. The plans start at single digits, but even then you...
Source: proxyway.com
OxyProxy vs. Smartproxy: A Detailed Comparison
Set of Services Provided by Smartproxy Service TypeDescriptionResidential ProxiesOffers IP addresses from real residential connections, ideal for high anonymity and avoiding blocks.Data Center ProxiesProvides faster speeds, suitable for tasks requiring high-speed connections.Rotating ProxiesAutomatically rotates IP addresses, enhancing anonymity and reducing the risk of...
Source: oxyproxy.pro
Top 10 Alternatives to Bright Data (formerly Luminati Proxy Networks)
The proxy pool is one of the cleanest as it is regularly being updated. Currently, it has over 5 million residential IP addresses sourced from many locations. As stated earlier, Soax is affordable even though its pricing model is the same with both Smartproxy and Bright Data โ€“ bandwidth-based. Just like Smartproxy, all you need to use the Soax service is a minimum of $75.
17 BEST Residential Proxies to Buy in 2022 (Cheap & Premium)
Smartproxy offers both residential and datacenter proxies, but their residential ones have the best features. Unlike most other residential proxy providers, Smartproxy focuses solely on providing the best residential IPs to businesses.
Source: earthweb.com
10 Best Free Online Proxy Server List of 2022 [VERIFIED]
Smartproxy offers a residential proxy network with 40M+ IPs. It offers the solutions of data center proxies, search engine proxies, etc. Chrome proxy extension will help you with accessing the localized content. Proxy address generator provides the facility of exporting the proxy list for any software.

MarkItDown Reviews

We have no reviews of MarkItDown yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, MarkItDown should be more popular than Decodo. It has been mentiond 15 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Decodo mentions (6)

  • Best Amazon Scraper APIs To Check Out in 2024
    Smarproxy is another proxy provider that offers a dedicated section for scraping e-commerce platforms including Amazon. Their Amazon API is known for its speed and quality and can be used just with a simple POST request. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
  • Basic Web Browser with Electron +APIS
    Smartproxy: Offers residential proxies with support for HTTP(S) and SOCKS5. It is known for its high success rate and 24/7 technical support. Smartproxy provides a balance between price and performance, making it accessible to less experienced users (Smartproxy). - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Cheap Residential Proxy: Affordable and Reliable Proxy Service for Anonymous Browsing
    For instance, imagine you are conducting market research and need to scrape data from various websites for analysis. By using a residential proxy service like anyip.io or Smart Proxy, you can ensure that your scraping activities are secure and undetectable while maintaining anonymity. Additionally, these services effortlessly handle throttling of threads and swiftly manage captchas. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Proxy for Instagram: What is It and How to Get It?
    Smartproxy Rotating residential IPs for multi-accounting. Large rotating residential proxy pool, 195+ countries, no subnets, an easy setup process. The IPs are from both desktop and mobile devices. Different tools for IG automation and affordable price plans ($75/5 GB ($15/GB). However the residential IPs are still P2P, so you have sticky sessions up to 30 min and then proxies rotate. - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago
  • Smartproxy Review
    Smartproxy is one of the latest rotating residential proxy services to hit the market. Smartproxy offers its users immense features and functionality at affordable rates. If youโ€™re looking for a long-term proxy service to stick to, itโ€™s worth looking at Smartproxyโ€™s unique offerings. - Source: dev.to / about 5 years ago
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MarkItDown mentions (15)

  • Meta Caps Internal AI Token Spending After Costs Approach Billions in 2026
    You don't need to use an online service to do this; you get to avoid spending money on tokens doing it offline. Gemma 4 works perfectly well offline on limited hardware (I have an 8GB video card) and can handle extracting text from image-based PDFs just fine. Take a PDF -> run it through MarkItDown [1], using the OCR plugin if you need (point it to Gemma 4) -> now you can ask Gemma 4 questions about the document.... - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago
  • Jimmy is a tool to convert your notes from different formats to Markdown
    Related: https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago
  • Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash
    I have a standing instruction for any documents that can't natively be read by a given AI to first be converted into .md using https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown which I've found to work really well. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago
  • Ask HN: How should I convert Microsoft Word documents to Markdown?
    Native support: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/onedriveblog/introducing-markdown-support-in-sharepoint-and-onedrive/4512174 Microsoft OSS python: https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago
  • The Best PDF to Markdown Tools in 2026 (Honestly Compared)
    Microsoft's open-source MarkItDown is a Python library and CLI that converts PDFs (plus Office files, images, audio and more) into Markdown aimed squarely at language models. It's fast, free, and trivial to drop into a script. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Decodo and MarkItDown, you can also consider the following products

Bright Data - World's largest proxy service with a residential proxy network of 72M IPs worldwide and proxy management interface for zero coding.

Doc2Markdown - Convert PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel and more to clean Markdown

Oxylabs - A web intelligence collection platform and premium proxy provider, enabling companies of all sizes to utilize the power of big data.

Markdown to PDF - Super simple way to get your markdown files to PDF

IPRoyal - At IPRoyal, we offer premium proxy servers, including residential, datacenter, ISP, and mobile proxies.

Markitdown Online - Markitdown Online - Convert DOCX, PDF, PPT to Markdown for Your AI